In 1896 he
settled in Munich and studied
first in the private school of Anton
Ažbe and then at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. He went back to Moscow in 1914 after
World War I started. He was
unsympathetic to the official theories on art in Moscow and
returned to Germany in 1921. There he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture from 1922
until the Nazis closed it in 1933.
He then
moved to France where he
lived the rest of his life, and became a French citizen in
1939. He died at Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944.

Artistic periods

An early period work "Munich-Schwabing
with the Church of St. Ursula" (Kandinsky 1908)

Kandinsky's creation of purely abstract work followed a long period
of development and maturation of intense theoretical thought based
on his personal artistic experiences. He called this devotion to
inner beauty, fervor of spirit, and
deep spiritual desire inner necessity, which was a central
aspect of his art.

Kandinsky learned from a variety of sources life in Moscow. Later
in his life, he would recall being fascinated and unusually
stimulated by color as a child. The fascination with color symbolism and
psychology continued as he grew. In 1889 he was part of
an ethnographic research group that travelled to the Vologda region north
of Moscow. In Looks on the Past he relates that the
houses and churches were decorated with such shimmering colors
that, upon entering them, he had the impression that he was moving
into a painting. The experience and his study of the folk art in
the region, in particular the use of bright colors on a dark
background, was reflected in much his early work. A few years
later, he first related the act of painting to creating music in
the manner for which he would later become noted and wrote, "Color
is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano
with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one
key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul."

It was not until 1896, at the age of 30, that Kandinsky gave up a
promising career teaching law and economics to enroll in art school
in Munich. He was not immediately granted admission in Munich and
began learning art on his own. Also in 1896, prior to leaving
Moscow, he saw an exhibit of paintings by Monet and was particularly taken with the
famous impressionistic Haystacks which, to him, had a
powerful sense of color almost independent of the objects
themselves. Later he would write about this experience:

He was similarly influenced during this period by Richard Wagner's Lohengrin which, he felt, pushed the
limits of music and melody beyond standard lyricism.

Kandinsky was also spiritually influenced by H.P.Blavatsky (1831–1891), the most
important exponent of Theosophy in modern
times. Theosophical theory postulates that creation is a
geometrical progression, beginning with a single point. The
creative aspect of the forms is expressed by the descending series
of circles, triangles, and squares.Kandinsky's book Concerning
the Spiritual In Art (1910) and Point and Line to
Plane (1926) echoed this basic Theosophical tenet.

Artistic metamorphosis (1896–1911)

Kandinsky's time at art school, typically considered difficult to
get through, was eased by the fact that he was older and more
settled than the other students. It was during this time that he
began to emerge as a true art theorist in addition to being a
painter. The number of existing paintings increased at the
beginning of the 20th century and much remains of the
many landscapes and towns that he painted, using broad swathes of
color but recognizable forms. For the most part, however,
Kandinsky's paintings did not emphasize any human figures. An
exception is Sunday, Old Russia (1904) where Kandinsky
recreates a highly colorful (and fanciful) view of peasants and
nobles before the walls of a town. Riding Couple (1907)
depicts a man on horseback, holding a woman with tenderness and
care as they ride past a Russian town with luminous walls across a
river. Yet the horse is muted, while the leaves in the trees, the
town, and the reflections in the river glisten with spots of color
and brightness. The work shows the influence of pointillism in the way the depth of field is
collapsed into a flat luminescent surface. Fauvism is also apparent in these early works.
Colors are used to express the artist's experience of subject
matter, not to describe objective nature.Perhaps the most important
of Kandinsky's paintings from the first decade of the 1900s was
The Blue Rider (1903), which shows a small cloaked figure
on a speeding horse rushing through a rocky meadow. The rider's
cloak is a medium blue, and the shadow cast is a darker blue. In
the foreground are more amorphous blue shadows, presumably the
counterparts of the fall trees in the background. The Blue Rider in
the painting is prominent, but not clearly defined, and the horse
has an unnatural gait (which Kandinsky must have known). Indeed,
some believe that a second figure, a child perhaps, is being held
by the rider, though this could just as easily be another shadow
from a solitary rider. This type of intentional disjunction,
allowing viewers to participate in the creation of the artwork,
would become an increasingly conscious technique used by Kandinsky
in subsequent years, culminating in the (often nominally) abstract
works of the 1911–1914 period. In The Blue Rider Kandinsky
shows the rider more as a series of colors than of specific
details. In and of itself, The Blue Rider is not
exceptional in that regard when compared to contemporary painters,
but it does show the direction that Kandinsky would take only a few
years later.

From 1906
to 1908 Kandinsky spent a great deal of time travelling across
Europe, (he was an associate of the Blue Rose symbolist group of Moscow)
until he settled in the small Bavarian town of Murnau.The Blue Mountain (1908–1909) was
painted at this time and shows more of his trend towards pure
abstraction. A mountain of blue is flanked by two broad trees, one
yellow and one red. A procession of some sort with three riders and
several others crosses at the bottom. The faces, clothing, and
saddles of the riders are each a single color, and neither they nor
the walking figures display any real detail. The flat planes and
the contours also are indicative of some influences by the
Fauvists. The broad use of color in The Blue Mountain,
illustrates Kandinsky's move towards an art in which color is
presented independently of form, and which each color is given
equal attention. The composition has also become more planar, as it
seems that the painting itself is divided into four sections- the
sky, the red tree, the yellow tree, and the blue mountain
containing the three riders

The Blue Rider (1911–1914)

The paintings of this period are composed of large and very
expressive colored masses evaluated independently from forms and
lines which serve no longer to delimit them but are superimposed
and overlap in a very free way to form paintings of an
extraordinary force.

The influence of music has been very important on the birth of
abstract art, as it is abstract by nature—it does not try to
represent the exterior world but rather to express in an immediate
way the inner feelings of the human soul. Kandinsky sometimes used
musical terms to designate his works; he called many of his most
spontaneous paintings "improvisations", while he entitled more
elaborated works "compositions".

In addition to painting Kandinsky developed his voice as an art
theorist. In fact, Kandinsky's influence on the history of Western
art stems perhaps more from his theoretical works than from his
paintings. He helped to found the Neue
Künstlervereinigung München (New Artists' Association) and
became its president in 1909. The group was unable to integrate the
more radical approach of those like Kandinsky with more
conventional ideas of art and the group dissolved in late 1911.
Kandinsky then moved to form a new group The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) with like minded artists
such as August Macke and Franz Marc. The group released an almanac, called
The Blue Rider Almanac, and held two exhibits.
More of
each were planned, but the outbreak of World
War I in 1914 ended these plans and sent Kandinsky home to
Russia via Switzerland and Sweden.

Kandinsky's writing in The Blue Rider Almanac and the
treatise On the Spiritual In Art, which was released at
almost the same time, served as both a defense and promotion of
abstract art, as well as an appraisal that all forms of art were
equally capable of reaching a level of spirituality. He believed
that color could be used in a painting as something autonomous and
apart from a visual description of an object or other form.

Return to Russia (1914–1921)

In his own words, Composition
VII was the most complex piece he ever painted (Kandinsky
1913)

Through the years 1918 to 1921, Kandinsky dealt with the cultural
development politics of Russia and collaborated in the domains of
art pedagogy and museum reforms. He devoted his time to artistic
teaching with a program based on form and color analysis, as well
as participating in the organization of the Institute of Artistic
Culture in Moscow. He painted little during this period. In 1916 he
met Nina Andreievskaia, who in the following year became his wife.
His spiritual, expressionistic view of art was ultimately rejected
by the more radical members of the Institute as too individualistic
and bourgeois. In 1921 Kandinsky received the mission to go
to Germany to attend the Bauhaus of Weimar, on the
invitation of its founder, the architect Walter Gropius.

The Bauhaus (1922–1933)

"On White II" (Kandinsky 1923)

The Bauhaus was an innovative architecture
and art school whose objectives included the merging of plastic arts with applied arts, reflected in its teaching methods
based on the theoretical and practical application of the plastic
arts synthesis. Kandinsky taught the basic design class for
beginners and the course on advanced theory, and also conducted
painting classes and a workshop where he completed his colour
theory with new elements of form psychology. The development of his
works on forms study, particularly on point and different forms of
lines, lead to the publication of his second major theoretical book
Point and Line to Plane in 1926.

Geometrical elements took on increasing importance in his teaching
as well as in his painting, particularly circle, half-circle, the
angle, straight lines and curves. This period was a period of
intense production. The freedom of which is characterised in each
of his works by the treatment of planes rich in colors and
magnificent gradations as in the painting Yellow – red –
blue (1925), where Kandinsky shows his distance from constructivism and suprematism movements whose influence was
increasing at this time.

The large two meter width painting that is Yellow – red –
blue (1925) consists of a number of main forms: a vertical
yellow rectangle, a slightly inclined red cross and a large dark
blue circle, while a multitude of straight black or sinuous lines,
arcs of circles, monochromatic circles and scattering of colored
checkerboards contribute to its delicate complexity. This simple
visual identification of forms and of the main colored masses
present on the canvas only corresponds to a first approach of the
inner reality of the work whose right appreciation necessitates a
much deeper observation—not only of forms and colors involved in
the painting, but also of their relation, their absolute position
and their relative disposition on the canvas, of their whole and
reciprocal harmony.

In front
of the hostility of the political parties of the right, the Bauhaus
left Weimar and settled in Dessau from
1925. Following a fierce slander campaign from the Nazis,
the Bauhaus closed at Dessau in 1932. The school pursued
its activities in Berlin until its
dissolution in July 1933.Kandinsky then left Germany and settled
in Paris.

The great synthesis (1934–1944)

Composition X, painted during
WWII.

(Kandinsky 1939)

In Paris he was quite isolated since abstract painting—particularly
geometric abstract painting—was not recognized, the artistic
fashions being mainly Impressionism
and cubism. Kandinsky lived in a small
apartment and created his work in a studio constructed in the
living room. Biomorphic forms with supple and non-geometric
outlines appear in his paintings; forms which suggest externally
microscopic organisms but which always express the artist's inner
life. He used original colour compositions which evoke Slavonic
popular art and which are similar to precious watermark works. He
also occasionally mixed sand with paint to give a granular texture
to his paintings.

This period corresponds, in fact, to a vast synthesis of his
previous work, of which he used all elements, even enriching them.
In 1936 and 1939 he painted his two last major compositions;
canvases particularly elaborate and slowly ripped that he hadn't
produced for many years. Composition IX is a painting with
highly contrasted powerful diagonals and whose central form give
the impression of a human embryo in the womb. The small squares of
colors and the colored bands seem to stand out against the black
background of Composition X, as stars' fragments or
filament, while enigmatic hieroglyphs with pastel tones cover the large
maroon mass, which seems to float in the upper left corner of the
canvas.

In Kandinsky’s work, some characteristics are obvious while certain
touches are more discrete and veiled; that is to say they reveal
themselves only progressively to those who make the effort to
deepen their connection with his work. He intended his forms, which
he subtly harmonized and placed, to resonate with the observer's
own soul.

Kandinsky's conception of art

The artist as prophet

Writing that "music is the ultimate teacher," Kandinsky embarked
upon the first seven of his ten Compositions. The first
three survive only in black-and-white photographs taken by fellow
artist and friend, Gabriele
Münter. While studies, sketches, and improvisations exist
(particularly of Composition II), a Nazi raid on the
Bauhaus in the 1930s resulted in the
confiscation of Kandinsky's first three Compositions. They
were displayed in the State-sponsored exhibit "Degenerate Art" then destroyed along with
works by Paul Klee, Franz Marc and other modern artists.

Influenced by Theosophy and the perception
of a coming New Age, a common theme among Kandinsky's first seven
Compositions is the Apocalypse,
or the end of the world as we know it. Writing of the "artist as
prophet" in his book, Concerning the Spiritual In Art,
Kandinsky created paintings in the years immediately preceding
World War I showing a coming cataclysm which would alter individual
and social reality. Raised an Orthodox Christian, Kandinsky drew
upon the Jewish and Christian stories of Noah's Ark, Jonah and the
whale, Christ's Anastasis and Resurrection, the Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse in the Revelation, various
Russian folk tales, and the common mythological experiences of
death and rebirth. Never attempting to picture any one of these
stories as a narrative, he used their veiled imagery as symbols of
the archetypes of death / rebirth and destruction / creation he
felt were imminent to the pre-World War
I world.

As he stated in Concerning the Spiritual In Art (see
below), Kandinsky felt that an authentic artist creating art from
"an internal necessity" inhabits the tip of an upward moving
triangle. This progressing triangle is penetrating and proceeding
into tomorrow. Accordingly, what was odd or inconceivable yesterday
is commonplace today; what is avant garde today (and
understood only by the few) is standard tomorrow. The modern
artist/prophet stands lonely at the tip of this triangle making new
discoveries and ushering in tomorrow's reality. Kandinsky had
become aware of recent developments in sciences, as well as the
advances of modern artists who had contributed to radically new
ways of seeing and experiencing the world.

Composition IV and subsequent paintings are primarily
concerned with evoking a spiritual resonance in viewer and artist.
As in his painting of the apocalypse by water (Composition
VI), Kandinsky puts the viewer in the situation of
experiencing these epic myths by translating them into contemporary
terms along with requisite senses of desperation, flurry, urgency,
and confusion. This spiritual communion of
viewer-painting-artist/prophet is ineffable but may be described to
the limits of words and images.

Artistic and spiritual theoretician

As the Der Blaue Reiter
Almanac essays and theorizing with composer Arnold Schoenberg indicate, Kandinsky also
expressed this communion between artist and viewer as being
simultaneously available to the various sense faculties as well as
to the intellect (synesthesia). Hearing
tones and chords as he painted, Kandinsky theorized that, for
examples, yellow is the color of middle-C on a piano, a brassy
trumpet blast; black is the color of closure and the ends of
things; and that combinations and associations of colors produce
vibrational frequencies akin to chords played on a piano. Kandinsky
also developed an intricate theory of geometric figures and their
relationships, claiming, for example, that the circle is the most
peaceful shape and represents the human soul. These theories are
set forth in Point and Line to Plane (see below).

During the months of studies Kandinsky made in preparation for
Composition IV he became exhausted while working on a
painting and went for a walk. In the meantime, Gabriele Münter
tidied his studio and inadvertently turned his canvas on its side.
Upon returning and seeing the canvas—yet not identifying
it—Kandinsky fell to his knees and wept, saying it was the most
beautiful painting he had seen. He had been liberated from
attachment to the object. As when he first viewed Monet's
Haystacks, the experience
would change his life and the history of Western art.

In another event with Münter during the Bavarian Abstract Expressionist years,
Kandinsky was working on his Composition VI. From nearly
six months of study and preparation, he had intended the work to
evoke a flood, baptism, destruction, and rebirth simultaneously.
After outlining the work on a mural-sized wood panel, he became
blocked and could not go on. Münter told him that he was trapped in
his intellect and not reaching the true subject of the picture. She
suggested he simply repeat the word "uberflut" ("deluge"
or "flood") and focus on its sound rather than its meaning.
Repeating this word like a mantra, Kandinsky painted and completed
the monumental work in only a three-day span.

Theoretical writings on art

The analysis made by Kandinsky on forms and on colors doesn't
result from simple arbitrary ideas associations, but from the inner
experience of the painter, who has passed years creating abstract
paintings of an incredible sensorial richness, working on forms and
with colors, observing for a long time and tirelessly his own
paintings and those of other artists, noting simply their
subjective effect on the very high sensibility to colors of his
artist and poet soul.

So it is a purely subjective form of experience that everyone can
do and repeat taking the time to look at his paintings and letting
acting the forms and the colors on his own living sensibility.
These are not scientific and objective observations, but inner
observations radically subjective and purely phenomenological which
is a matter of what the French philosopher Michel Henry calls the absolute
subjectivity or the absolute phenomenological life.

Concerning the Spiritual in Art

Originally published in 1911, Kandinsky compares the spiritual life
of humanity to a large triangle similar to
a pyramid; the artist has the task and the mission of leading
others to the top by the exercise of his talent. The point of the
triangle is constituted only by some individuals who bring the
sublime bread to other people. It is a spiritual triangle which
moves forward and rises slowly, even if it sometimes remains
immobile. During decadent periods, souls fall to the bottom of the
Triangle and men only search for the external success and ignore
purely spiritual forces.

When we look at colours on the painter's palette, a double effect
happens: a purely physical effect on the eye, charmed by
the beauty of colors firstly, which provokes a joyful impression as
when we eat a delicacy. But this effect can be much deeper and
causes an emotion and a vibration of the soul, or an inner
resonance, which is a purely spiritual effect, by which the
color touches the soul itself.

The inner necessity is for Kandinsky the principle of the
art and the foundation of forms and colors' harmony. He defines it
as the principle of the efficient contact of the form with the
human soul. Every form is the delimitation of
a surface by another one; it possesses an inner content which is
the effect it produces on the one who looks at it attentively. This
inner necessity is the right of the artist to an unlimited freedom,
but this freedom becomes a crime if it is not founded on such a
necessity. The art work is born from the inner necessity of the
artist in a mysterious, enigmatic and mystic way, and then it
acquires an autonomous life; it becomes an independent subject
animated by a spiritual breath.

The first obvious properties we can see when we look at isolated
color and let it act alone; it is on one side
the warmth or the coldness of the colored tone, and on the other
side the clarity or the obscurity of the tone.

The warmth is a tendency to yellow, and the coldness is a tendency
to blue. The yellow and the blue form the first big contrast, which
is dynamic. The yellow possesses an eccentric movement and the blue
a concentric movement; a yellow surface seems to get closer to us,
while a blue surface seems to move away. The yellow is the
typically terrestrial color whose violence can be painful and
aggressive. The blue is the typically celestial color
which evokes a deep calm. The mixing of blue with yellow gives the
total immobility and the calm, the green.

Clarity is a tendency to the white and obscurity is a tendency to
the black. The white and the black form the second big contrast,
which is static. The white acts like a deep and absolute
silence full of possibilities. The black is a nothingness
without possibility, which is an eternal silence without hope, and
corresponds to death. That’s why any other color resonates so
strongly on its neighbors. The mixing of white with black leads to
gray, which possesses no active force and whose affective tonality
is near that of green. The gray corresponds to immobility
without hope; it tends to despair when it becomes dark and regains
little hope when it lightens.

The red is a warmth color, very living, lively and
agitated, it possesses an immense force, it is a movement in
oneself. Mixed with black, it leads to brown which is a
hard color. Mixed with yellow, it gains in warmth and gives the
orange which possesses an irradiating movement on the
surroundings. When red is mixed with blue, it moves away from man
to give the purple, which is cooled red. The red and the
green form the third big contrast, while the orange and the purple
form the fourth one.

Point and line to plane

Kandinsky analyzed, in his writings, the geometrical elements which
compose every painting, namely the point and the
line, as well as the physical support and the material
surface on which the artist draws or paints and which he called the
basic plane or BP. He didn’t analyze them on an objective,
exterior point of view, but on the point of view of their inner
effect on the living subjectivity of the observer who looks at them
and lets them act on his sensibility.

The point is, in practice, a small stain of color put by
the artist on the canvas. So the point used by the painter is not a
geometric point, it is not a mathematical abstraction, it possesses
a certain extension, a form and a color. This form can be a square,
a triangle, a circle, like a star or even more complex. The point
is the most concise form, but according to its placement on the
basic plane it will take a different tonality. It can be isolated
or put in resonance with other points or lines.

The line is the product of a force. It is a point on which
a living force has been applied in a given direction, the force
applied on the pencil or on the paint brush by the hand of the
artist. The produced linear forms can be of several types: a
straight line, which results from a unique force applied
in a single direction, an angular line, which results from
the alternation of two forces with different directions, or a
curved or wave-like line produced by the effect
of two forces acting simultaneously. A plane can be
obtained by condensation, from a line rotated around one of its
ends.

The subjective effect produced by a line depends on its
orientation: the horizontal line corresponds to the
ground, on which man rests and moves; it possesses a dark and cold
affective tonality similar with black or blue. The
vertical line corresponds to height which offers no
support; it possesses a luminous and warm tonality close to white
and yellow. A diagonal possesses by consequence a more or
less warm or cold tonality according to its inclination according
to the horizontal and to the vertical.

A force which deploys itself without obstacle as the one which
produces a straight line corresponds to lyricism, while
several forces which confront or annoy each other form a
drama. The angle formed by the angular line
possesses as well an inner sonority which is warm and close to
yellow for an acute angle (triangle), cold and similar to blue for
an obtuse angle (circle) and similar to red for a right angle
(square).

The basic plane is, in general, rectangular or square,
thus it is composed of horizontal and vertical lines which delimit
it and define it as an autonomous entity which serves as support to
the painting, communicating its affective tonality. This tonality
is determined by the relative importance of horizontal and vertical
lines, the horizontals giving a calm and cold tonality to the basic
plane, while the verticals give it a calm and warm tonality. The
artist possesses the intuition of this inner effect of the canvas
format and dimensions, which he chooses according to the tonality
he wants to give to his work. Kandinsky even considers the basic
plane as a living being that the artist "fertilizes" and of which
he feels the "breathing".

Every part of the basic plane possesses a proper affective
coloration which influences the tonality of the pictorial elements
that will be drawn on it, and which contributes to the richness of
the composition which results from their juxtaposition on the
canvas. The above of the basic plane corresponds to the
looseness and to lightness, while the below evokes the
condensation and heaviness. The work of the painter is to listen
and to know these effects in order to produce paintings which are
not just the effect of a random process, but the fruit of an
authentic work and the result of an effort toward the inner
beauty.

Quotations on Kandinsky

"[Kandinsky] has not only produced a work whose sensorial
magnificence and invention richness eclipses those of its most
remarkable contemporaries; he has given moreover an explicit theory
of abstract painting, exposing its principles with the highest
precision and the highest clarity. In this way the painted work is
coupled with an ensemble of texts that enlighten it and that make
at the same time of Kandinsky one of the major theorists of the
art." (Michel Henry, Seeing the
invisible, on Kandinsky)

"Kandinsky has been fascinated by the expression power of
linear forms. The pathos of a force entering in action and whose
victorious effort is annoyed by no obstacle, that’s lyricism.
That’s because the straight line proceeds from the action of a
unique force with no opposition that its domain is lyricism. When
on the opposite two forces are in presence and enter in conflict,
as this is the case with the curve or with the angular line, we are
in the drama." (Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible, on
Kandinsky)

"Kandinsky calls abstract the content that painting must
express, that’s to say this invisible life that we are. In such a
way that the Kandinskian equation, to which we have alluded to, can
be written in reality as follows : Interior = interiority =
invisible = life = pathos = abstract." (Michel Henry,
Seeing the invisible, on Kandinsky).

John E Bowlt and Rose-Carol Washton Long. The Life of
Vasilii Kandinsky in Russian art: a study of "On the spiritual in
art" by Wassily Kandinsky. (Newtonville, MA.: Oriental
Research Partners, 1984). ISBN 0-89250-131-6